]]>509The choices in freedomhttp://wendykwan.ca/2018/10/the-choices-in-freedom/
Sun, 14 Oct 2018 18:29:17 +0000http://wendykwan.ca/?p=505Well, hi. I haven’t blogged here in several months. Quite a bit has changed, I suppose. I moved out of my old flat, and I did a trip to the Nordics recently (Norway, Sweden, Denmark). (Finland is somewhere on that to-visit list. Maybe when I’m a bit wealthier.)

Work has been good. My team at work won a bit of new business recently, so it’s been hectic trying to get things in order as we transfer in some of these new responsibilities.

Other than that, life has been relatively regular. I’ve been dating on and off with people I meet via apps, but nothing solid/consistent has come to fruition. My opinion on this has just been that “at least I’m trying”. At least I’m putting myself out there, right?

I have been concerned about other things in the past couple of months though. Things that are starting to creep up on me, and I have been trying to muster up the courage to consider it in the most realistic, most mature way possible. Both these things relate to each other:

Brexit

My Tier 5 visa expiring next summer

I’m a part of a couple of “Canadians in the UK” groups on Facebook, and over the past year, as Brexit has neared, I’ve seen more and more young Canadians living in the UK post about the difficulty of getting sponsored by their company for a Tier 2 visa. This was back before the summer, in April, when the UK hadn’t changed their current Tier 2 policy to exempt medical professionals like nurses and doctors. Now, with Brexit inching ever closer, I’ve been reading more and more articles about the consequences of the UK leaving the EU. And with my own Tier 5 visa expiring next summer, I now need to come to a decision if I want to stay in a country where it will lose many economic benefits as part of leaving the EU trading bloc.

So I don’t know. I haven’t fully decided. I am a lot happier in this city than I was back in Toronto, but this is all before Brexit. Things could will change when the UK leaves the EU. Travel will be more expensive; food will be more expensive; electricity bills will be more expensive, etc. Will all of this be worth it? Will London’s even lower quality of life be worth staying for an additional five years?

Brexit is making me realize that I don’t really enjoy the mass beliefs in this country at all. This is a generalization, and I am most certainly not calling out all Brits here, but the utter apathy of what is happening to this country’s political efforts is just embarrassing. Or if people do care, they only bitch and moan about it. There’s a lack of activism or a lack of confrontation that’s really holding Brits back from being a better version of themselves.

Why do they fear speaking out their true opinions? There’s such a widespread characteristic of sitting back and not challenging the status quo of a social group that everyone in that social group ends up following each other around, being overly agreeable to each other’s thoughts. Before I moved here, I knew that the UK leaned slightly towards collectivism than Canada’s individualism on Hofstede’s business culture charts, but sometimes this widespread peer pressure still continues to surprise me.

But back to Brexit. I came across a great couple of tweets today that describe British people’s feelings towards Brexit very well. I considered sharing them on Instagram, but figured they might offend the actual Brits who follow me there, so I thought I would share them here. They relate back to an analogy Graham Norton used during a TV interview very recently:

Absolutely spot on, but it’s more of an English pride and unwillingness to admit that one is wrong which has now led to this catastrophic mess. Hopefully this will change this national trait forever

I am convinced that the attitude most UK people have towards Brexit nowadays is entirely because of this. They’ve been brought up to be proud countrymen, but now, even when their country is actually going to the shitholes, they are too stubborn to admit that they’ve done something wrong. Instead, they would rather point, make jokes, and laugh at Theresa May’s terrible effort of governance rather than discuss why it happened in the first place.

The government for this country is why I have issues with the behaviour of some Britsh people I’ve met over here. I don’t blame the people (most of the time) because they’ve been brought up this way, but I wish more British people were genuinely more sensitive and more empathetic towards other people and their experiences. It’s 2018; there’s no British empire anymore. Both globalization and immigrants make local economies stronger. They need to wake up that governments don’t change unless we all collectively speak up and challenge each other’s thinking.

]]>505Wake up to new perspectiveshttp://wendykwan.ca/2018/03/wake-up-to-new-perspectives/
Mon, 26 Mar 2018 10:59:04 +0000http://wendykwan.ca/?p=497It’s my birthday today. I’m typing this while sitting on the bed of my Airbnb, a place I’m staying at temporarily until my new flatshare is ready for me to move in.

It’s been a hectic couple of months. It feels like a lot has happened.

I got a new supervisor at work, so there’s been some adjustment around there. I finally moved out of my terrible houseshare, so I feel like I can finally breathe now. I also found a consistent group of friends I could rely on for chill times. It’s getting better.

The important point though is that today has been the first day I’ve had off from work since January. I don’t know how full-time salaried workers in London do it. Especially those who work in far more stressful occupations than I do. I don’t know how they can survive from the beginning of January until the Easter bank holiday long weekend without taking a single full-day off from work. That just sounds unhealthy to me.

Speaking of work culture, I had a nice chat the other day with a guy who used to live in Toronto about the differences between the job markets in Toronto and London. The summary of that conversation is that it’s way more difficult to find a job in Toronto than in London. In London, there are more jobs than there are people. You’re paid a bit less in London, but it’s easier to find a job; in Toronto, it’s the opposite. Salary aside though, company cultures in London are a tad better than in Toronto. It’s not uncommon to find someone working at the headquarters of a major company, so because of this, these companies actually treat their employees pretty well; their HR departments care more than just filling in the next hole.

So anyway. I feel like I’ve finally settled in London. The first six or seven months were actually really difficult; it wasn’t until I looked back did I realize that it really was a challenging time for me. There were so many things I needed to adjust to, so many things I needed to realize that “that’s just how things work around here”, so many cultural things I needed to peacefully acknowledge… Some things you just can’t argue or fight over, because that’s how things always were. I just needed to stop and realize there is a difference between “peacefully acknowledging” and “accepting”.

Now that I’ve settled in London, I finally want to take the time to open up my mind to start on what I came here to do – to learn about different perspectives.

Toronto is arguably the most multicultural city in the world. Over 50% of the city population identify themselves as a visible minority. But if you grew up in the city, unless you really push yourself to immerse yourself in other cultures, you’re kinda just stuck in the culture you grew up in. And by that, I mean that personally, I limited my own thinking by not making a more conscious effort to learn more about people outside of the East Asian ethnicities. I was comfortable, and I knew it. So I made the decision to physically move out of the city and to move outside of my comfort zone. I was tired of hanging around East Asian people all the time. If we, as East Asian people, want more people to see us as regular human beings, we have to make a conscious effort to expand our networks too. To show that we’re all just regular joe’s, and we deserve to be seen as humans and not some sort of exotic being.

All that said though, I don’t know if I’m only saying all of this because I’m on my day off from work, and my mind is finally relaxed enough to think about life, or because I actually mean it.

I guess we’ll see. I’ll check in with myself a month from now to see if I really did mean what I said.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but it was a big part of my preteens, as it was really the only TV show I liked and was able to watch as soon as I got home from school. Between the hour of me returning home from school to the hour of my dad returning home from work, Dawson’s Creek was sort of an escape from reality, my window to how the “real world” worked outside of my strange ugly first generation Asian family culture.

During the hour that it was on TV, it would be my only escape from the depression I was going through at the time. It was like through this TV show, I was seeing what adulthood could be like. It gave me a perspective on how white families interacted with each other – hell, it was a perspective on how white people, in general, interact with each other. My life then was so influenced by Asian values that I didn’t know how to interact with non-Asian people other than how I was originally brought up.

Yes, all people are the same, but at that time, I didn’t realize how much of my behaviour was influenced by how I was brought up. The passive aggressiveness? The blunt critiquing? Both characteristics are things that I picked up from being around my Asian family. Thought these things were normal and acceptable, until I started watching Dawson’s Creek and realized that how I behaved wasn’t something that’s usually seen in Western society.

Maybe my exposure to Dawson’s Creek is the thing that made me become more “whitewashed” than the high school friends I grew up, but I don’t know for sure. I just know that this show was a positive influence in my preteen life, and I’m so happy that other people remember it as an influential TV show in the 1990s too.

]]>490The British drinking culturehttp://wendykwan.ca/2017/12/the-british-drinking-culture/
Sat, 09 Dec 2017 01:39:05 +0000http://wendykwan.ca/?p=484That didn’t take long, did it? I’ve only been here in the UK for five months and already I’m cringing at another drinking event with colleagues or with friends. British drinking culture is truly something else.

I’m saying this because it’s December, and people all around are more festive than ever. There are more drinking events, more parties, more celebrations, etc. I’m slowly getting exhausted by all the social activities.

I feel like I’ve gone to at least five of these things in the past few weeks, where I’ve been drinking at least 1 litre of alcohol each time… It’s honestly taking a toll on me. I’m not going anymore, I can’t handle that much alcohol in such a short time. It’s not even about being old and grumpy anymore; it’s about wanting to stay healthy, and wanting to lead a healthy lifestyle. I can’t do that when I’m drinking every damn week. It’s too much.

My workplace’s Christmas party is next week, and I’m honestly a bit nervous about how I’m going to handle it. Colleagues don’t seem to understand the meaning of “no, I’m leaving; I don’t want another drink”, so I hope I can pull off drinking a 50/50 balance of alcohol/water that night without getting judged for not being fun.

The worst part of all of this is that I can physically feel my stomach feeling worse and worse after the weeks go on. Smelling weird overprocessed foods make feel a bit nauseous, even if it’s hours after I’ve downed 2.5 pints of cider.

I have another drinking social event tomorrow. One of my friends is moving back to Canada, so she has organized bottomless brunch for some of us. I’m nervous. I’m not a strong drinker, and especially not in recent weeks.

]]>484The ups and downs of moving to a different countryhttp://wendykwan.ca/2017/11/the-ups-and-downs-of-moving-to-a-different-country/
Sun, 19 Nov 2017 21:54:44 +0000http://wendykwan.ca/?p=480Almost forgot about this blog again! I’ve been nursing a migraine on-and-off for the past several days, so I’ve had a lot of time to myself with my own thoughts.

It’s been a busy couple of weeks, as I try to settle into my new job and my new country. I think now that I’ve gotten a better sense of how things work in this part of the world, I’ve been trying to figure out if I regret moving across the Atlantic Ocean.

The answer is that I don’t know yet.

I don’t think I do, but there are definitely some aspects of Canada that I miss.

The top one being the higher quality living standards they have in Toronto than in London. We might have condos everywhere, and elevators rarely work, but at least we have working water, at least we have a house heating system that circulates warm air throughout the house, and at least we have citizens that have a habit of recycling!

I guess you can say that I am still trying to adjust to this country. I will never get tired of being in such close proximity to so much world history, but after living in this city for four months, you slowly start to realize why publications like The Economist rank Toronto so high up on their ‘most liveable cities’ index.

Anyway, in the meantime, I’ve been booking out-of-country vacations left and right. One of my friends here in London will be returning to Toronto at the end of the year, and she said that one of the things that she regrets the most is not travelling more within the British Isles.

So that’s my goal for the first half of 2018: Travel to Ireland, visit Scotland, and visit Wales. There are a lot of cool spots around the U.K. that are fairly close-by, so I must do so before I never get the chance again! (Who knows what will happen in the future… Maybe this is just a case of me needing to move out of my terrible house-share situation.)

I booked myself a three-day trip to Paris in December, which I’m really excited about. I haven’t spoken French for so long! Gotta work on my accent, that’s for sure. I’m also really excited to see what Paris will be like during the Christmas season. Can’t wait to see all the Christmas decorations around the city!

Also, as you can see from the featured image, my friend and I went to see Harry Potter and the Cursed Child play this weekend. The story itself was a bit rushed, but the stage effects are absolutely mind-blowing; they really make you feel like you’re a part of the wizarding world! Some of them were so believable, I had actually gasped aloud at some of the stage effects. The play really makes me want a magical cape of my own! It would be loads of fun just walking in it, and seeing it billow out behind you.

Our seats weren’t great – there was a large side pole in front of our views – so my friend and I are actually considering going again. Perhaps in a year or so, I’ll consider going again.

Well, that’s it for now. Maybe I’ll come back to visit this blog again after my trip to Paris! Ta ta for now.

P.S. I miss my desktop computer and my desktop monitor. Typing on a laptop really stresses me out. How are people OK with being hunched over their desk like this? There has got to be an easy way to remember to sit up straight when using a laptop.

]]>480First job in the UK, and a short trip to Munichhttp://wendykwan.ca/2017/09/first-job-in-the-uk-and-a-short-trip-to-munich/
Sat, 16 Sep 2017 15:06:51 +0000http://wendykwan.ca/?p=473Hello hello! Quite a bit has happened since my last thorough blog post, but I don’t feel like going into the finer details just yet. I’ll share some quick highlights though!

The main one is that I started a new job last week! It’s been an utter whirlwind of trying to wrap around my head around working in a brand new industry. Data analytics, in general, is all the same. You’re trying to measure something with metrics that are unique to an industry. But at the beginning, when you’re new to the industry, it’ll take you a long time to get used to all the measurements and formulas. That’s my biggest challenge right now.

Besides my new job though, there’s other good news to share – I paid a trip to Munich, Germany about three or four days before I started working. It was very much an impromptu vacation. After requesting my earliest start date at work, I immediately went online to book a flight to a European country. I knew that it was going to be a solo trip, so I knew the country I picked had to be receptive of tourists who spoke only English. So Germany it was!

I’ve always wanted to visit Germany. I’ve also always wanted to do a road trip around the country – too bad I don’t have a driver’s license though – but because Munich is so far down south in the country, I figured that if I ever do end up doing a road trip in Germany, it would have to skip over Munich.

Munich was absolutely beautiful! I had the foresight to check the weather for the five days I was there because I knew I wanted to visit the stunning Neuschwanstein Castle on a day with good weather. It was incredibly sunny the day I visited, so even though I look squinty in my photos with the castle, I’m still so glad I went because it ended up raining my last two days in Munich.

I’ve heard that the city of Munich is considered expensive compared to the rest of Germany, but I didn’t find it overly expensive. London is a way more expensive city to live in! I suppose living in London the past couple of months has made me numb to how expensive other cities actually are. That’s not a good thing!

I also visited the Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial Site, the Nymphenburg Palace (which is the building you see in the featured image with the swan), and St. Michael’s Church during my time in Munich. Bavarian architecture is just absolutely beautiful. I was really impressed by the intricate details Bavarian architects include in their building designs. You can’t see that sort of elaborateness over in Canada.

Anyway, it was a really nice trip to Munich. I’m glad I did such an impulsive vacation before I started work because I’ve got so much to learn the next couple of months. Hopefully, I won’t ghost on this blog due to work!

It’s important to realize that we can miss something, but still don’t want it back.Paulo Coelho

]]>467Disappointing trip to hot air balloon festivalhttp://wendykwan.ca/2017/08/disappointing-hot-air-balloon-festival/
Sun, 13 Aug 2017 13:07:48 +0000http://wendykwan.ca/?p=452Two blog posts in less than a week! This must be some sort of record!

A few London gal pals and I did a day trip to Bristol yesterday, to check out the Bristol International Balloon Fiesta. It’s supposed to be the biggest hot air balloon festivals in Europe! We were all looking forward to checking out the hot air balloons because we’ve never really seen one up close, but boy, were we disappointed.

I’ve never been to a large outdoor music festival before (e.g. Coachella, Wayhome, or Tomorrowland), but if this is what they’re like, then I’m glad that I experienced the hecticness of an outdoor music festival at a smaller hot air balloon festival instead.

When we got there – after a delightful detour in the city of Bristol to grab lunch, eat ice-cream, and take photos of the suspension bridge – we found out that hot air balloons only launch at two times during the day: 6:00 AM and 6:00 PM. Fair enough, we thought, so we decided to walk around the festival area to see what was available. What we discovered was: not much.

Food and entertainment were both mediocre at best. Food stalls were like any other festival food stalls – expensive and mediocre. The entertainment wasn’t entertaining, and it was incredibly difficult to find a spot to view the events that were supposed to tide us over between the two balloon launches. That said, I’m not too upset about either of these things. It’s an outdoor festival after all; logistically, there’s only so much you can provide for your guests.

The most frustrating part of the festival, however, was the utter lack of a crowd management strategy. The festival is arranged so that company sponsors, food stalls, and amusement rides surround the main balloon launch area. Picture a large circular festival area, with the balloon launch area situated in the very centre of this circle. The problem with this arrangement was that the Bristol International Balloon Fiesta didn’t make the festival area into a complete circle.

On one end of this incomplete doughnut, the festival organizers set up amusement park rides for children, while the other end were food stalls. There isn’t anything wrong with setting up amusement park rides on one end of this doughnut because this park area would then generally be occupied by large families who were more than happy to settle down into a spot on the grass and stay there for the rest of the day.

However, with the other end of this incomplete doughnut essentially being a cafeteria, you’re faced with a huge crowd management problem. When people buy food at a festival, they either 1) stay in the area to finish the food, or 2) grab their food and return to where they were sitting/standing. So when you have an incomplete doughnut, where one end of the festival is essentially a “dead end”, you’re faced with a huge traffic issue.

Instead of having attendees pick up their food and leave the cafeteria area in an orderly manner where they can loop back to the other side of the festival circle, the location of these food stalls required attendees to pick up their food and do a “U-turn” in order to return to their viewing spot.

To add to the frustration, in front of this food stall area, the festival had arranged for a large viewing area where families could park their resting blankets for the day. So now, as a hungry festival attendee with both hands holding food, you’re now trying to avoid a crowd that is heading in multiple directions and trying to avoid grumpy festival guests that are seated on their resting blankets.

I can forgive the festival for cancelling the 6:00 PM hot air balloon launch because of unstable weather, but I can’t forgive festival organizers for not implementing a better crowd management strategy. Dirty shoes? Fine. A lighter wallet? Fine. But struggling to work your way through a crowd of kids, “hangry” guests, and baby strollers? Nope.

I’m pretty sure that this year’s festival isn’t the first time they’ve had it at the Ashton Court Estate. Organizers should know every nook and cranny of the park by now. When festival attendees have nothing else to do, they look for the easiest thing they can do, which is eat. If organizers are going to allow a viewing area in front of these food stalls, then the least they can do is make sure that the area is designated, so it cannot be expanded further by even more families plopping blankets on the heavily trodded food stall path.

Also, by forming a complete doughnut for the festival area, guests now have the option to create and follow traffic that flows in-and-out like a two-way road. No U-turns involved.

I wish we had a more enjoyable time at the hot air balloon festival. Maybe organizers will fix crowd management issues for next year, but I don’t think I will attend again. Being in such a large disorganized mob of people (and with a limited mobile signal!) makes me far too impatient.

When we decided to leave the festival for good, we found out the line-up to return to Bristol’s Temple Meads train station via shuttle bus was at least a 30-minute wait. We ended up walking back to the train station instead. By the time we reached London’s Paddington station, it was already 10:30 PM at night. We had left Ashton Court at 7:30 PM.

Before we left, a few of the hot air balloons lit up in preparation for the evening festivities, so I will post a photo of them below. It was hugely disappointing to have seen only three hot air balloons at what is Europe’s biggest hot air balloon festival.

]]>452A return to an old practice in a new worldhttp://wendykwan.ca/2017/08/a-return-to-an-old-practice-in-a-new-world/
Thu, 10 Aug 2017 00:34:07 +0000http://wendykwan.ca/?p=436Hello hello!

Yes, I realize that it’s been over seven months since my last post on this website. I never forgot about this blog – it’s difficult to forget the fact that you have four years worth of personal journal entries floating around somewhere on the Interwebs – but I just haven’t gotten around to updating the site like I had promised at the beginning of 2017. A lot has happened since then.

Here’s a quick run-down:

Moved back home from my downtown apartment to prepare myself for a move to London, UK.

Left my consumer insights job obviously, for the above reason.

Met up with friends for some final Toronto farewells.

Moved to London while only knowing two other people in the city.

Found a flat, moved into said flat, set up a bank account, applied to jobs.

It’s been a hectic past few months, but I have learned so much about me, people, and the world around me. It’s amazing how much you learn about yourself when you force yourself into an unknown environment. Humans’ natural survival instinct is a wonderful thing.

A lot of people have asked me in the past few weeks on why I made the decision to move to London all of a sudden. But the thing is, this decision wasn’t a decision that I made suddenly, it was something that I started considering back in October 2016.

This will sound cliché, but life is short. It really is. Having worked on “client-side”, and seeing so many people working at a company for such a long period of time – “lifers” – it really made me realize how short life is. I sound so much like an atypical millennial right now, saying how short life is, how uninterested I am in a decade-long career at one singular company, etc. But there were other factors in my decision too.

I knew that if I wanted to work or study overseas, it had to be done in my 20s, when I was single, when I had little to lose, and more importantly, when I was still eligible for United Kingdom’s Tier 5 Youth Mobility visa. Once I enter my 30s, I would no longer be able to apply for this visa.

Then there was the fact that I wanted to grow up faster. Because I took a much longer period of time to graduate from university, I knew I had some catching up to do in terms of building my career. Everything that one experiences in the first few jobs after graduation was something that I was in a rush to experience. I know, life is not a race, but I was in a rush to experience the appropriate experiences that would eventually mature me into a better adult. (I am aware that “a better adult” is an arguable descriptor.) I experienced a lot in my first full-time role after university – arguably more so than what most new graduates experienced in their first position – but to me, knowing that I was much older than most graduates when they first entered the workforce, I knew that I had a ton of catching up to do.

Yet this contradicts one of the other factors that went into my decision to leave Canada – life is not a race. All my life, as a first-generation Chinese-Canadian, I’ve been pressured to succeed in every aspect of life. (I came across the /r/AsianParentStories subreddit late last week, by the way, and I found that I was able to relate to most of the posts on that page.) I knew that I needed some time by myself to learn more about myself without any influence from my parents. A question I wanted an answer to was: “Am I actually ambitious, or is my ambition just a result of my upbringing?”

Moving out from my parents’ place back in March 2016 was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made for myself in my young 20-something years. It opened my eyes to how much my parents have influenced me over the years. Quite honestly, they’ve been such a big influence, it was to a point where I was unsure of who I was. It was as if I had been living in a box all these years, and had been struggling to burst out into my own self.

I was struggling in my relationships with my friends too. There were so many different sides of me that I was showing to people. If I was too quiet in one crowd of friends, I felt like I didn’t belong. If I was too opinionated, I felt like I didn’t belong. I was too passive for some friends but too strong for others. It was as if I could never win. And that felt wrong. My happiness is about me. I am aware that there are aspects of myself that I definitely needed to work on, but I also needed to find out exactly how much I needed to change, how much I wanted to change, and how much I allowed myself to give up in order to maintain these relationships. Or, most honestly, how valuable I consider these relationships that I would be willing to give up a part of myself.

So there you have it. A long blog about the various reasons as to why I decided to up and leave Toronto, Canada.

As a closing note, I’ll end this entry with this quote from an actor on one of my favourite TV shows at the moment:

Sometimes opportunities present themselves to you in unfamiliar ways. And oftentimes the discomfort that come with those decisions are an indication for how important they are to your development. Discomfort is a fundamentally important feature of our lives, and something that demands action. The actions we choose to make determine who we become, and so discomfort is the grand catalyst to growth. I’ll try to remember this next time I’m in knee deep water. Cole Sprouse